Drivers increasingly invite insurance companies — including Mayfield Village-based Progressive Corp. — to ride along and monitor their driving, Forbes.com notes, which has privacy advocates worried that the new form of discounts “creates the potential for corporations to monitor a lot more than just how many miles we drive, and how fast we do it, especially location.”

Insurers promise they won't misuse the data. (Did you expect them to say anything else?)

Progressive, which has been advertising its Snapshot device for more than a year, “says its monitoring device doesn't even use GPS technology and can't capture location data,” according to Forbes.com.

“Progressive says its device measures how often you brake hard, how many miles you drive each day and how often you drive between midnight and 4 a.m.,” the website says. “It does not track whether you're speeding or your location, the company said.”

However, many competing programs using GPS data potentially could do just that, even if the insurance companies promise not to use it, Forbes.com says.

“The best way to protect a consumer's locational privacy is to not collect the data in the first place,” according to a statement from two California-based groups, PrivacyActivism and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

Those groups “point out that one of the biggest aims of pay-as-you-drive programs is simply to capture actual miles driven,” the story notes. “Cars already have a device that does that, called an odometer, they said. In other words, insurance companies could find some other, less-invasive way to capture mileage.”

Or consumers should just understand that in a technology-driven world, they give up some privacy in exchange for deals.

Don't drink the water — it's expensive

You've probably noticed this when you're paying bills, but a USA Today analysis confirms that water costs in Cleveland are soaring.

The newspaper produced a series of maps that chart where water prices have increased the most since 2000. Cleveland is one of 14 cities in which water costs have increased 130% or more.

We're 14th on that list, which is led by Atlanta, with a 233% increase. San Francisco and Wilmington, Del., also saw increases of 200% or more.

USA Today attributes the increasing prices to several factors:

The cost of paying off the debt on bonds municipalities issue to fund expensive repairs or upgrades on aging water systems;

Increases in the cost of electricity, chemicals and fuel used to supply and treat water;

Compliance with federal government clean-water mandates;

Rising pension and health care costs for water agency workers; and

Increased security safeguards for water systems since the 9/11 terror attacks.
Ground game

The Washington Post visits Mentor for a look at the lives of political canvassers as Election Day draws near.

“With millions of dollars being poured into TV advertising, social media and other high-tech strategies, both campaigns say they are more convinced than ever that face-to-face conversations are by far the most effective form of contact with voters, and those efforts are robust in Ohio and the other swing states,” The Post says.

The work is only for the deeply committed, as it sounds pretty grueling. Take this snippet, for example:

In a strip-mall campaign office that opened in April next to Ace Cash Loans (in Mentor), 12 canvassers for President Obama — mostly middle-aged and retired women — rehearsed door-knocking pitches Saturday morning.

“Tell your own personal story,” a paid staffer from New Jersey was urging them. “It comes across if you're speaking from the heart.”

A handwritten sign taped to a wall described their goal: 1,200 doors this weekend.”

You really have to believe in your candidate to want to spend your weekend knocking on 1,200 doors.

On second thought …

This op-ed piece from The Wall Street Journal, based partly on data from a Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland researcher, bucks conventional wisdom and argues that “U.S. business cycles going back more than a century show that deep recessions accompanied by financial crises are almost always followed by rapid recoveries.”

The standard view among policy makers is that “serious recessions associated with financial crises are necessarily followed by slow recoveries — like the one we've experienced since mid-2009,” writes Michael Bardo, a professor of economics at Rutgers University and a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.

“But this widespread belief is mistaken,” he writes.

Prof. Bardo notes that economist Milton Friedman had a different way of looking at recoveries from cyclical downturns: the "plucking" model.

Mr. Friedman “imagined the U.S. economy as a string attached to an upward sloping board, with the board representing the underlying long-run growth rate,” according to Prof. Bardo. “A recession, in this view, was a downward pluck on the string; the recovery was when the string snapped back. The greater the pluck, the faster the bounce back to trend.”

In a recent working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Prof. Bardo notes that he and Joseph Haubrich of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland “examined U.S. business cycles from 1880 to the present. Our study not only confirms Friedman's plucking model but also shows that deep recessions associated with financial crises recover at a faster pace than deep recessions without them.”

They “found that recessions that were tied to financial crises and were 1% deeper than average have historically led to growth that is 1.5% stronger than average,” according to Prof. Bardo. “This pattern holds even when we account for various measures of financial stress, such as the quality spread between safe U.S. Treasury bonds and BAA corporate bonds and bank loans.”